Part 2 of The Shumate Guide to Graduate School saw me struggle through classes that, while objectively designed to be understood by human beings, might as well have been presented in Klingon. I now present my journey through chemical research.
I was finally in the lab. There were all sorts of new instruments to play with, new solutions to make, and all kinds of research papers to read. I sat down with my advisor to get my first assignment. I’d already read a few papers he’d published, so I had a decent idea of what to expect.
“You’re going to use the STM.” Oh boy! The STM, or scanning tunneling microscope, was the scientific equivalent of Santa leaving you a Nintendo. You could actually take pictures of molecules with it. My first day, and I was already on the cutting edge!
“Great! When can I start?”
“As soon as you fix the STM.”
And thus, my career as a researcher was interrupted as I became a mechanic. The STM wasn’t a complicated instrument: it was a small measuring device that hooked to a computer. The actual microscope sat in a dark box, suspended by bungie cords to eliminate vibrations from the outside. There was a set of instructions under the computer. Awesome, I thought, I get to actually see the inner workings of this instrument!
I’ve never been a good mechanic, and I didn’t magically grow engineering prowess, sitting in front of the STM. The manual was obviously translated from Japanese, via Russian, into English, and it made no sense. I did what I do in every fix-it situation: I jiggled every wire I could find. Thankfully, one of the wires WAS loose. I put it back in, start up the instrument, and it started imaging.
“Hey boss! I fixed it!” And in only one afternoon!
“Just wait.” I would grow to hate that phrase.
“Wait?” What, was it going to spontaneously break?
“You have to have absolutely no vibrations to get good images. That means there can be nobody in the building.”
“Nobody in the building? But there’ll be people in here all day.”
“Until about 2:00 in the morning, yeah.”
“It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, now! I didn’t bring dinner…”
And so I sat, for twelve hours, to get one good image. I showed it to my boss the next day, and he was somewhat pleased. “I need at least five more of these.” And there went all of my nights for the next week. But, that was over, and I was onto something else.
Another instrument to use, another one to fix before I could use it. And they got harder to fix: I once spent four months fixing an instrument that I had to use for five minutes. And it broke again as soon as I was finished. I wasn’t getting a degree in chemistry as much as a lesson in instrument repair.
I got some data during that time, though. I never thought to actually think about what that data might mean, I was just happy to see some numbers. The last year of my graduate career made me pay for that mistake. It was time to write my dissertation, and decide just how badly I wanted that Ph.D.
Oh yeah, and I had to get a real job. That part was crap, too.
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